Mother Jones, February 27, 2020: Is It Race or Class? Darrick Hamilton Showed Bernie the Answer.
In March 2018, nearly a year before officially putting in for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders hosted a town hall at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center on the subject of “Inequality in America.” The event promised a lively discussion of “the rise of the oligarchy and the collapse of the American middle class”—lively in large part due to the presence of three people onstage who would soon play central roles in shaping the policy contours of the Democratic presidential primary. There was Sanders, hunched behind the glass table, playing the greatest hits of his 2016 insurgency and railing about “how over $13 trillion in wealth has been transferred from the bottom 99% to the top 1%” over the past four decades. There was Elizabeth Warren, his 2020 rival, telling her now-familiar story about paying for her University of Houston degree on a part-time waitressing job and lamenting the shift since then in “who this government works for and who it creates opportunity for.”
The third person was a fortysomething man, seated next to filmmaker Michael Moore, in a gray suit with a modest Afro and goatee, furiously scribbling notes as his more famous co-panelists held forth. When Sanders and Warren finished outlining their broad-based remedies for inequality, the man spoke up to offer a gentle correction. “I’d be remiss not to point out that these vulnerabilities are more pronounced for the marginal groups—race, gender, disability status, formerly incarcerated,” he said in a jovial staccato of academese. “They face obstacles the general population doesn’t.” The reason, he said, is systemic racism embedded in government policies that kept Black families from accumulating wealth.
Darrick Hamilton has become the wonk for this political moment because of his talent for quietly reframing the conversation. Now the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State, he has dedicated his years in academia to “stratification economics,” a field of study he helped pioneer that offers structural and sociological explanations for economic inequality as opposed to behavioral or genetic reasons. Hamilton and his longtime collaborator and PhD adviser, Sandy Darity, are largely responsible for the prominence of the racial wealth gap in the discourse surrounding racism and inequality.
